Chengde city is located in the agro-pastoral transitional zone in northern China near the capital city of Beijing, which has experienced large-scale ecological construction in the past three decades. This study quantitatively assessed the environmental changes in Chengde through observation records of water resources, water environment, atmospheric environment, and vegetation activity and inves...

Crop improvement efforts have benefited greatly from advances in available data, computing technology, and methods for targeting genotypes to environments. These advances support the analysis of genotype by environment interactions (GEI) to understand how well a genotype adapts to environmental conditions. This paper reviews the use of spatial analysis to support crop improvement research aimed...

Efficient methods to explore plant agro-biodiversity for climate change adaptive traits are urgently required. The focused identification of germplasm strategy (FIGS) is one such approach. FIGS works on the premise that germplasm is likely to reflect the selection pressures of the environment in which it developed. Environmental parameters describing plant germplasm collection sites are used as...

Forests are biologically diverse systems, representing some of the richest biological areas on Earth. They offer a variety of habitats for plants, animals and micro-organisms. However, forest biodiversity is increasingly threatened as a result of deforestation, fragmentation, climate change and other stressors. Biodiversity is the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or on t...

Forests are biologically diverse systems, representing some of the richest biological areas on Earth. They offer a variety of habitats for plants, animals and micro-organisms. However, forest biodiversity is increasingly threatened as a result of deforestation, fragmentation, climate change and other stressors. Biodiversity is the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or on t...

Forests are biologically diverse systems, representing some of the richest biological areas on Earth. They offer a variety of habitats for plants, animals and micro-organisms. However, forest biodiversity is increasingly threatened as a result of deforestation, fragmentation, climate change and other stressors. Biodiversity is the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or on t...

In spite of the development of various improved cultivars of maize, yield in Nigeria has continued to be hampered by the over cropped nature of most farmlands as well as a wide range of pests and diseases. This study therefore carried out an analysis of agro-chemical inputs’ use in maize production among small scale farmers in Iwo Local Government Area of Osun State. Specifically, the study inv...

Following the ban of synthetic antibiotics as antimicrobial agents and growth promoters, poultry nutritionists are now trying to find antibiotic substitutes. Agro-industrial by-products are abundant in tropical countries and have been used as the alternatives to conventional feedstuffs in poultry rations. These by-products are also known to contain several bioactive compounds such as oligosacch...

Land degradation has expanded in the Mediterranean region as a result of a variety of factors, including economic and population growth, land-use changes and climate variations. The level of land vulnerability to degradation and its growth over time are distributed heterogeneously over space, concentrating on landscapes exposed to high human pressure. The present study investigates the level of...

Contemporary rural Viliui Sakha of northeastern Siberia, Russia, are a Turkicspeaking people practicing horse and cattle breeding in the subarctic. This article details their story of survival in the north as one not only of adapting a southern subsistence to an extreme climate but also to the effects of Russian colonization, Soviet collectivization, and post-Soviet decentralization. In the pos...